Luna123

Guess you haven't watched Something in the Rain? :)

He was flustered because he accidentally came out as Korean, and he wanted to shake her off as quick as possible. So he sent her into a different direction. It was just a stupid little lie, but sometimes little lies have serious consequences...

He did say it, in the first few minutes of the episode (think it was not 'real time' but a memory). But he made sure she would not hear him over the smoothie maker's noise, so she still has no idea...

Right, these days it's called lining rather than underskirt, but basically the same function incl. emergency bandage (though the flimsy, colored fabric is not quite as appropriate as the white cotton or linen of olden days)

Sleeping with earrings is just a tiny step up from going to bed in full makeup and waking up with it still perfect, which is a superpower that every kdrama FL has. :)

It was the underskirt that she ripped up, not the visible outer layer.

On the other hand, that very pregnant bride must have given birth in FL's shop because her baby bump is gone by the time she's getting into the van...

I'm not quite halfway into Search: WWW yet, but it is not the least bit similar to A Piece of Your Mind. As far as I can tell Search is about kickass businesswomen in a (more or less realistic) tech environment, APOYM has a sci-fi (fantasy?) AI element but it is all about grief and healing.

Yes, though it's only a few short scenes at the end, so not everyone felt it was enough. :)

No love triangle in the classic kdrama sense (i.e. annoying second leads trying to interfere in the main couple's relationship). However, male lead starts out with a long-time one-sided crush on another woman, so that could be considered a triangle I guess.

Yeah I didn't expect to love APoYM as much as I do, because normally I prefer very realistic, down to earth dramas like SitR and OSN. So being blown away by something that has such an unusual, poetic, dreamlike vibe as APOYM was a total surprise... (while I ended up hating When the Weather Is Fine which should have been, in theory, exactly my style).

Still, I'm always waiting for the news that Ahn Pan Seok is working on a new project and cross my fingers that it will be a Kim Eun script again. They are the best team ever in my opinion. :)

You'd be probably alarmed to know how many times I watched Something in the Rain. :D But then it's only SitR, One Spring Night and A Piece of Your Mind that I rewatch, with other kdramas I might revisit a few favorite scenes, but not whole episodes let alone series. So far, these three retain the magic no matter how many time I've seen them - since I don't speak Korean, I appreciate them even better when I don't need to read the subs and can focus on the acting.

So sorry to hear that you also had to go through harassment! *hugs* I hope that the situation is getting better slowly, the more brave women dare to stand up against it, the less those disgusting men will think they can get away with such behavior.

I'm one of the few who love the OST - I would not call it the best ever, but it sets up the mood of the drama perfectly and that's all I need. Everyone who dislikes the OST mentions Stand by Your Man as the real offense (you are the first one I see also calling out Save the Last Dance :)), but there are five main songs (SBYM, STLD, and Rachel Yamagata's Something in the Rain, La La La and Be Somebody's Love - I love all three), plus several instrumental pieces including Up Against that is beautiful imo. One Spring Night has a similar number of songs yet it gets much less complaints, so I guess SitR suffers from using such an (in)famous song... I hate the lyrics as much as anyone, but now I associate the song with the drama and can't dislike it anymore. :) Of course I have the advantage that English is not my native language so I can just tune out the words.

I wonder if the songs were in Korean rather than in English, would they get the same reaction from (international) viewers? Because for the show's intended audience, these songs are a foreign language so even if they understand the words, probably can ignore them easily. And in turn, the foreign language/repeating OST makes the Korean songs stand out more. They are easy to dismiss because they are usually sung during drunken karaoke sessions, but they were chosen very carefully. There is for example Life by S.E.S, sung by Jin Ah and Kyung Sun in episode 11 or 12: the chorus is about how life is unpredictable, which is both scary but also makes it worth living. Back in episode 1, a drunk Jin Ah admitted how she finds the predictable life she is expected to lead (work, date suitable guy, get married, have kids) really depressing...
Pretty much all Korean songs comment on or foreshadow the storyline. Even the necklace Jun Hee gives to Jin Ah, while basically a product placement, ties into this: it's part of Rosemont's "La Vie En Rose" collection - and the Edit Piaf song fits the OTP relationship perfectly.

Also, a possible reason to use Stand by Your Man again and again is exactly because of its reprehensive lyrics - patriarchy is still going strong in Korea and women are reminded at every turn to know their place, to be nice and submissive and have no dreams or ambitions beyond marriage. It is the conditioning that Jin Ah has been living with all her life. And reading comments and reviews on the drama, an lot of people seem to berate the character exactly because they think she failed to 'stand by her man'...

I wouldn't really call it toned down, more like, while SitR deliberately ignored the usual kdrama formulas, OSN took them for a spin - but managed to make them feel organic and often even felt mocking them. Sure, let's put the first kiss in episode 8; but have Ji Ho ask why the hell it took so long to do it (yeah I know technically he asked about the handholding :)). Add some beautiful quotable lines about love; but make the character read it from a book because ordinary people rarely spout pearls of wisdom. Let's do the classic push and pull dynamics - but not between the couple but the wannabe fathers-in-law. Technically, what the writer did is quite brilliant.

lol I'm the opposite, because the fact that APoYM had to overcome such difficulties makes me rank it higher. I can blame any flaws on the episode cut, so it's not on the show but on tvN. ;) I'm so with you on the withdrawal... I thought I would never get over my SitR obsession and I still haven't entirely, but now it has to share with APOYM, so let's call that progress. :D

They certainly edited the scripts, there are several subplots you can see the stubs of, hints of what might have been. So much subtext they could have added to the main storyline... Still, they did an amazing job at salvaging the show - I have watched(dropped ;)) shows that were much more messy, without having to cope with such a drastic change in their storytelling scope. I hate that the show didn't get a chance to realize its full potential, but even what we got is a gem I'll cherish forever.

Anybody who says Hae In always plays the same role either hasn't seen the shows he starred in, or is an extremely poor judge of character. There is absolutely nothing in common between Seo Jun Hee and Moon Ha Won, apart from the respect they treat their love interests. He can't change his face obviously but everything else is different, his body language, even the way he looks at the FL - always full of love but the expression is still completely different. He is an amazing actor and seeks out projects that require true talent rather than just a pretty face.

Also, he is in his 30s and the industry being ageist as it is, he only has several years before he will be considered too old to play romantic lead roles. He can play villain/psycho/detective/etc for the rest of his life, so it's understandable if for now he goes for the options that come with an expiry date.

The article's title said that these are your picks, so it's not like you ever claimed these are objectively the bestest shows ever or anything like that. It's a subjective list and you have every right to include multiple shows by the same director or actor if they really speak to your heart. :)

Thank you so much for this article! We obviously have similar taste when it comes to dramas, so I'll add Just Between Lovers (the only one of these I never tried) to my list of shows to watch. :)

Something in the Rain deserves all the praise and more, it is about as perfect as any Korean drama ever gets. Yet I understand why it doesn't resonate well with many kdrama fans, because it doesn't feel anything like the usual shows from the country. Apart from the impossibly gorgeous leads, it resemles a lot to the best of British TV: the focus on ordinary lives, the emotional honesty, the complex and flawed characters, the subtlety, the complete lack of sugarcoating... Everything the characters do makes perfect sense knowing who they are and where they come from; they act like real people and not like idealized fictional characters. There are so many little things, from the Casablanca quote to the La Vie En Rose necklace Jun Hee gives to Jin Ah (most fitting product placement ever?) that you might only notice on rewatch, but they tell how carefully if was all put together.

One Spring Night is among my favorites as well, though (mostly for personal reasons) I don't like it quite as much as its sister show. It is obvious though that these two were designed to be two sides of the coin, no wonder director Ahn Pan Seok tried to get both leaders of SitR on board again... Still, for the time being I rank A Piece of Your Mind higher, but I'm still in the honeymoon phase with that show so I might change my mind in a few months. :)

<3 But I hope your family is more reasonable than Jin Ah's mom!

About the legal side, Ji Soo agreed to do the voice recording without making any restrictions for future use of the file. It's not that her voice was secretly recorded without her knowledge. Of course, using that recording for the AI without express permission was still in the grey zone. And Kim Hoon points it out to Ha Won that they could get in trouble for it. But people do crazy things when they are grieving.

As for Seo Woo, she thinks that the husband is not only responsible for the death of her boyfriend's mother, but he also turned a blind eye to the suffering of his own wife because he was a selfish coward. She hates the guy and doesn't want him to have anything to do with the echo of her friend inside the device. Emotionally, her reaction makes perfect sense. Legally, she is wrong and the court would be probably on the husband's side. Though the tech side belongs to the AI company, so I think the judge could only order them to stop and destroy the device, but not to handle it over.

The voice recording is only for the voice itself (Ha Won even offers to change it in case Seo Woo finds it creepy).

The personality, memories etc. come from inputting all possible data about the person. This is from the video displayed in the lobby of Ha Won's company:
"Connecting AI and big data, DNA information and medical science, this is the beginning of Network Medicine. Network Medicine is a program that remembers one's personal history as both medical history and personal life story, to then lead to a diagnosis by categorizing psychological patterns..."

If someone combined everything that google, amazon and facebook knows about a person, they could probably make some pretty accurate guesses about that person... Sure, that is still very far from the device as shown in the drama; for all the technobabble, it is basically a magic box. In my opinion it is not any harder to swallow than time travel or parallel universes, but I understand if it's a deal breaker for some viewers.